Book Review: Plan for Chaos

I had been going about my life thinking that I had read all of John Wyndham's books (The Chrysalids, The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, etc.) but after recently getting a library card in Auckland I came across a book of his I'd never even heard about before: Plan for Chaos.  Seeing as his books have been some of my favourites, I immediately took it out and put it at the top of my reading list.

To be honest I was a tad bit disappointed.  Unlike all of his other novels, which deal with something a little supernatural (or at least different), this one was pretty ordinary - though not realistic really.  The basic plot is that a bunch of identically looking women are turning up dead of apparent suicides.  The catch, the main character's fiancee looks exactly like these women.  So he goes on a search to find out what is going on and realizes that not only does his fiancee (who is also his cousin - yes, a little strange on that count) have several doubles, but that so does he.

Soon he is kidnapped by the doubles and their reason for being and their purpose and conection is revealed.  But to put it bluntly, I was not convinced.  I don't like revealing details, but it does involve a plot for worldwide domination and cloning (though, this probably was a very advanced thing to write about in the 50s).

This was not a page turner for me, by any means. The style seemed very different than his other novels, though for a brief bit at the beginning it had a film noir kind of feel to it - a nice detective story.

Seeing as this book was first published in 2009 (he died in 1969) and he had been working on it at the same time as one of his first novels (The Day of the Triffids) I would think it a safe assumption that he never intended this to be published at all.  Though I definitely prefer his other books, it was interesting to see this one, though I'm not going to go so far as to recommend it.